Today was the best day of the trip by far!! Even though I’ve said that almost every day. We spent the day on the Mekong Delta, traveling around from place to place and trying all sorts of new things. While being allergic to so many things meant I couldn’t try everything, I still felt like I had the best day ever. My favorite part of the day was when Hai asked me if I loved nature. I said yea of course and he said small nature or big nature? It was by this time that I realized by nature he meant a snake!! Holding the snake was the most fun thing I’ve done in so long I was sad we had to leave him.

After that we continued to travel and we got to hold bees, try honey, try chocolate and lots of coconut flavored things. We also got to travel by horse and by a boat rowed by someone. This was all outside which is my favorite thing so I was having a great time. The lunch we had was so amazing and in the Vietnamese way there were many courses. All of the things we sampled were great and we had the option to buy everything. This tourism on the delta is a large source of income for the people living there. You could tell each place we visited had something planned for us which made it hard to leave without buying something. Building this tourism business is probably bittersweet for the Delta. It brings in income which allows them to develop, but it’s hard on the environment. They have to build more paths, more buildings, and there is a lot more waste created. This can be hard on the environment which could make it harder to grow what they are there for.

I also wonder how it is on the culture. If they are focusing on tourists coming in they are going to adapt to them. This might make the genuine culture of the islands diminish. One of the industries we saw was the coconut industry, it was interesting because they can use all parts of the coconut in some way so it’s very efficient. We saw the people making and wrapping the coconut candy, it was interesting to watch them actually working right where we shopped. It certainly made you more likely to buy something. We also saw people making chocolate and honey.

In the lecture we heard last week about the Mekong, we learned their major industries are rice, fish, and fruit. We ate all three of these things when we were there today. We also learned the Delta is very vulnerable to climate change. The sea levels are rising and this has the potential to wipe out the Delta. Affects of this were hard to see since we had no benchmark to compare the water levels with but there was evidence of the things that cause climate change. Some of the Delta was littered with trash and this is not goof for the water or the fish. There was also a lot of debris in the water which hurts the water ecosystems. This harms not only the water but the people living there because it makes it harder to farm and fish. 

I hope the Mekong Delta becomes more developed so it can afford more education on sustainability. If the people there knew more about how what they are doing is not only affecting the earth but also affecting their business down the road, they would be able to flourish as a community and do their part against climate change.